


Space Boundaries

by Harukami



Category: Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Cannibalism, Gen, Travel, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:38:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harukami/pseuds/Harukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the destruction of the cruise ship and the death of Bat, the group still needs to make it back to base. But it's hard going, and emotional discoveries are tiring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Space Boundaries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sandrock](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Sandrock).



Serph holds Argilla until she cries herself out and Cielo keeps himself uncharacteristically silent and Gale, too, perhaps recognizing the weight of this moment, holds his tongue. It's a long time -- a surprisingly long time, as if the explosion in the tanker tore something wide open, wild and raw, that Argilla had kept so firmly under the surface in the time up until now. It's like her hunger, Serph thinks, this feeling. Grief, not for others but for herself. It's been a long time. So much like her hunger: she'll tuck it away under her skin, keep it building and boiling away until it explodes out of her and takes too much of herself with it. Perhaps she'll learn to modulate it, to express her grief when she must, like she taught herself to express her hunger when she must, however much she hates it.

Eventually, though, the crying stops and she draws a deep breath that sounds like something tearing, and pushes away from him a little. He holds just a moment longer, arms lingering, concerned for her, but lets them drop when the pressure continues.

"I'm fine," she says aloud. "I'm fine."

"What happened?" Gale asks, his tone relentlessly analytical. "Why did you cry? There is no need to weep over the death of an enemy."

"Not now, mon," Cielo says. He puts a hand on Gale's shoulder, as if to hold his questions back physically, and Gale gives him an uncomprehending expression. "Give 'er space. Okay, bro?"

Argilla straightens, not looking at any of them, her arms crossed over her chest. She stands half turned away, her hips uneven, weight mostly on one leg. "I said I'm fine. I'm just tired."

"It has been," Gale says, "a difficult day." It sounds almost tactful, though Serph suspects that he simply means difficult in terms of sheer planning and physical effort, not in the way Argilla would mean it. Still, she gives him a grateful look, and even if it's lost on Gale, Serph relaxes a little at the sight of it.

***

"Noooo way, mon," Cielo says. "Dat was an emergency trick only! You got any idea how much my back is hurtin' right now? Phew! I weren't built to carry tree people! We're walkin' and dat's dat."

And so they walk. Fortunately, the Junkyard's small -- oh, this far off, it'll be a few days on foot nevertheless, but it's not an impossible concept. Serph wonders, as they pick their way over stone and rubble, when it was that he got that concept, a "small" place, what it means for a place to be "small", what that could possibly compare it to. If, this being a few days of walking, there are trips that are more than a few days walking. A week. A month. A year. Impossible. If that could exist.

"Penny for your thoughts," Argilla says.

"'Ey, what's a penny, Argilla?"

She hesitates, falling behind briefly before catching up again. "I don't know," she says. "I think it's like macca."

Gale tsks his tongue. "That is foolish," he says. "There are no other currencies besides macca."

"Oh?" Argilla says. "Then tell me, hot shot, why do we have the word 'currency'?"

"It denotes a system of commerce-"

"And why a term for that? If all money is macca, why not just macca?"

Gale pinches the bridge of his nose. "There are plenty of things that have more than one word for them, Argilla."

"I know," she says. "But _why_?"

The discussion seems to have distracted them from the subject of Serph's thoughts, but he's content with that, really. What they're talking about, he thinks, is more or less the same thing. On a different topic, rotating around a different subject, but at its core completely identical.

"There is no reason," Gale says. "It simply is as it is."

Cielo shakes his head, beads clacking in his hair. "Ehhhhhh. I'm not so sure about dat, bro. Sometimes I tink dere's some great world out dere. Lots dat we haven't seen yet. What's on the edge of de Junkyard?"

"Wasteland," Gale says.

"And on de edge of dat?"

If anything, Gale looks irritated by the question -- aggravated, even, a line appearing between his brows as if his head is aching. "More wasteland."

"And on de edge of _dat_?"

"Nothing," Argilla says. "Walls and cliff-faces. It becomes impassible."

"And by air, still not'ing," Cielo says. "Fog and den some kind of wall."

Gale says, almost snappish, "Of course. Because it is impossible to go beyond the boundaries of the world."

"_Why_?" Argilla asks again.

This time, Gale's tone refuses to accept any further discussion. "It is simply as it is," he says.

***

At night, they set up turns for watches. It's been a long time since they've had to pull such long shifts -- back when Embryon was one of the scattered tribes, before it had become one of the great powers of the Junkyard. Back when it was just another of those hundreds of tribes struggling to defeat the others and take their men. They hadn't even had a base then so much as a collection of abandoned buildings to hang out in -- hadn't had enough people with enough skills to take over one of the six great bases. Back then, it was a matter of survival to always have at least one person awake, maybe two, for the long hours through the night.

And as officers, it's been a long time since they had to pull guard duty at all.

"Here's a flash to the past," Argilla mutters, as Serph wakes her for her two-hour turn. "I was so exhausted all the time back then. At least it's only for a few nights now."

Serph's hand hangs in the air from where he shook her shoulder for a long moment before he drops it. Surprise thrills through him. It's true, now that she mentions it -- it must be true; he knows this exhaustion, this familiar exhaustion of disturbed sleep during a long and hungry trip, but when he'd first been thinking back on it, he hadn't remembered at all how he'd felt back then.

***

"I hope dat Heat and Sera got home okay," Cielo says, through the middle of the second day.

Home -- as though their new base, which they've barely settled into, can be called a home. Serph considers this, frowning faintly. Home, where they've barely settled. Home, after abandoning Muladhara with a skeleton crew. Home, with no elegance, no lights or carvings to decorate it, no beds, no showers, no large Karma Terminal, no Vendor.

But he knows what Cielo means.

So does Argilla, it seems. "I'm sure they're fine," she says. "We haven't seen any real signs of them -- maybe even Heat can be sneaky when he puts his mind to it."

"Dat big lunk?"

"You never know," Argilla says. "He has Sera with him, so _hopefully_ he's not being too stupid out there. For her sake, anyway."

Gale says, "Regardless of if they did or did not make it back to the base safely--" _Back to the base_, Serph thinks, inanely. "--we will be unable to tell until we get there ourselves. We must simply wait and plan for both the best and the worst scenarios."

Argilla shakes her head, frowning faintly. "I don't know," she says. "I guess it feels like, we'd know if something happened to them."

Irritably, Gale's eyebrows twitch. He's on edge, Serph's seen. Not like Argilla and Cielo are on edge -- and though they're on edge in very different ways, with Argilla exhausted and pushing through it, and Cielo almost manic with energy, unable to sit still, there's something similar to the quality of their anxiety, something he can't put a word to but can identify regardless. Gale's edge is different, though, somehow internalized, like he has a pain or an itch he can't reach and is instead resolving to ignore. There's no vent for whatever he's struggling with, and he seems uptight.

Voice gone husky to the point of threat, Gale says, "That is completely illogical. Argilla, you have been behaving completely irresponsibly lately in regards to these matters."

"Irresponsibly--!" Her jaw drops.

Cielo is a bit ahead of them, peering over the rocks that partially block their way. He's clinging to them with fingers and toes, lean muscles tight, but he leans back, hanging from his hold to arch backward, looking at Gale upside down with his hair hanging every which way. He says, "But I agree with Argilla, Bro. Ja, sure, Heat's a big stupid lunk who always be causin' problems, an' it kiiiiinna crazy to put Sera in just his hands. But he's our brudda, an' Sera our sis. We're comrades, ja? He'll get her home. Anyting happen to dem, we'd know about it."

"Foolishness," Gale growls, and moves ahead, climbs past Cielo, takes the scouting position. Cielo gives them a shrug before scampering after. With an air of resignation, Argilla too shrugs at Serph, as if helplessly passing the sentiment on.

***

Towards the end of their second day -- almost home, but about to have to stop for the night regardless -- they're attacked by the Brutes.

Unsurprising, really, and the reason they'd set watches; the Brutes had come this far to take out the Cyber Shaman, so it was perfectly within understandable perameters of logic for roving bands to be around. It might signify that they'd found the new base or it might be coincidence, but either way the only thing to do was to take them out, and not let any escape to report.

It's just as well; by then the entire group is starting to feel weak with hunger -- an unpleasant sensation, Serph thinks, an undeniable sensation, with Varna raging in his head, roaring, banging around on the insides desperate to get out and take care of their needs for him. They fight, and they kill. It is their first kill since the ship and bears with it a sense of triumph -- hunger able to be satiated after an entire half-day -- and at the same time, a sense of grief. Serph feels it, anyway, thinks perhaps it is truly just an echo of Argilla's pain at the situation, a pain he and Cielo and Gale don't exactly share on their own. But he can share it, regardless: grief not for himself, but for Argilla's grief. Because, those days ago, she'd had to ask it, finally, why they're like this, why they need to do this, why are they even alive. Why do they kill to stay alive. And whatever answer he gave he knows will never truly cover all the situation. Will never actually answer it, fully and completely. And now, a fight, and more killing.

They're hungry, and they're soldiers, and so they kill. And then they rend and tear and devour enemies still living and enemies freshly killed and, after, they set up camp, start a campfire -- if a scouting group was here it's unlikely another is in the near vicinity; that would be inefficient. And Cielo lies back with his hands on his belly (not full; none of them are full, none of them can remember what full feels like) and says, "Mon, I wish I could see de stars."

_What are stars?_ It hangs in the air, silent. None of them say it.


End file.
